Thursday, December 23, 2010

Statistics being released now by the City of Toronto show that only 45% of Toronto Cyclists counted during September 2010, were actually using the taxpayer funded bike lanes in the downtown core.

The majority of cyclists actually preferred mixed traffic roads to bike lane provided roads, bringing to question the entire purpose of having bike lanes in Toronto, especially if more than half of Toronto Cyclists choose not to use them.

While only 24 per cent of the streets monitored for the count offered bike lanes, 45 per cent of the cyclists counted used those streets.

Counters manually recorded the number of cyclists passing Bloor St. in the north, Queens Quay in the south, Spadina Ave. in the west and Jarvis St. in the east over one 12-hour period. They also noted each cyclist’s sex and helmet use.

Compared with the number of cars downtown, of course, the number of bicycles is minuscule. The city does not have car numbers exactly comparable to the bicycle numbers it recently gathered, but a 2006 count showed 109,000 vehicles entering a larger downtown area between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. The number of cyclists entering the smaller downtown area used in 2010 during the same hours was 7,655.